The story behind Stuxnet, the malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear processing station, has been known in general since last fall when a team of researchers at Symantec released this document, which we covered at the time in our article here. But seeing is believing. I had a chance to attend a special briefing at Symantec's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. where Patrick Gardner, a director in their security group, actually showed us what was involved. It was a real thrill.

Stuxnet was a very sophisticated piece of software, some 10,000 lines of code that took man-years to develop. Symantec started seeing versions of the malware up to a year before the actual attack last June, they just had no idea what they were looking at until things started to happen at the nuclear facility. They eventually reverse engineered the entire code with a team of three working full time for several months.